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Wednesday

From The Archive: The Holocaust On Film (II): Tim Blake Nelson's The Grey Zone

Hollywood
stars Tim Blake Nelson and Harvey Keitel have made a controversial
Holocaust movie about the Jews who survived the camps by helping the
Nazis commit genocide.

The Grey Zone is one of the most fascinating Holocaust films
ever made, yet it never reached UK cinemas following its American debut
in 2002. While it was released in Israel, Germany and Spain, among other
markets, UK distributors baulked at the movie’s unredemptive narrative
and stark, despairing tone. This week, it is finally released here on
DVD. Written and directed by the Oklahoma-born actor Tim Blake Nelson, The
Grey Zone is based partly on Primo Levi’s essay of the same name and
the eyewitness account of Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jew who avoided
death by working as Josef Mengele’s personal research pathologist. It
compellingly investigates the impossible moral choices facing prisoners
forced into the Sonderkommando.These special squads were charged with running the camps’ crematoria.
They maintained order among the new arrivals — or “cargo” — on their
way to the gas chamber, removed the corpses, pulled gold teeth, cut
women’s hair, and sorted and classified clothes, shoes and other
belongings. They oversaw the burning of the bodies, and the collection
and disposal of the ashes. In exchange, they received larger quarters, books, better food,
alcohol, cigarettes and the right to loot the dead. After four months,
they were slaughtered themselves.The Grey Zone focuses on the 12th Sonderkommando of Auschwitz
II- Birkenau, who, in their final days in 1944, mounted an armed
rebellion. None of the squad survived, but they destroyed half of the
crematoria, which were never rebuilt, and killed 70 SS soldiers.“I wanted to explore how the concrete story of the 12th
Sonderkommando created moral abstractions which are ultimately
impossible to comprehend, but which at least can be experienced by an
audience member,” says Nelson, now 44, who adapted The Grey Zone from
his own award-winning off-Broadway play. “As an able-bodied Jew in my thirties, I could see myself in the very
situation the Sonderkommandos faced. The film is an attempt to explore
that predicament: would you save yourself, essentially by abetting the
slaughter of others? Or would you, as most of us would like to think we
would, refuse to do the work and be killed?” The Sonderkommando are one of the most controversial and sensitive
issues in Jewish history; they illustrated Levi’s point that life in the
camps could not be “reduced to the two blocs of victims and
persecutors”. “I grew up hearing that Jews were innocent victims, Nazis were evil
perpetrators, and there was no area in between,” says Nelson. “This, to
me, is no way to look at history.” Harvey Keitel, one of the film’s stars and executive producers,
admits that not all the survivors who read Nelson’s script approved.
“Some felt we should not make the film, that we had no right to do so;
others felt we should. I had to agree with both; that we had no right,
and that we had to.”The filmmaker Joel Coen, who had directed Nelson in the comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?,
urged his friend Nelson not to do the film. “Joel is quite keenly
suspicious of any Holocaust movie,” says Nelson. “He’s of the mind that
it’s next to impossible to make a film about this that works.” Avi Lerner, the film’s veteran producer, on the other hand, believes
The Grey Zone needed to be made. Raised in Haifa, he recalls an old
couple who were Holocaust survivors living in his building. As a child,
he was fascinated by the numbers on their hands, but they never talked
about the past. “Later, I felt that they felt guilty for surviving,” he
says. “And this is the question I ask myself even today: ‘What would I
have done in their situation?’” Very few Jews retaliated, he says. “As I grew up, that brought me to
the fact of why Israel is so important. I went up through the Israeli
army and became a paratrooper and an officer, because it was a matter of
surviving.”All of this informed his decision to fund The Grey Zone, even
though Lerner knew it made little commercial sense. “I just felt it is a
part of my life, it’s a part of any Jewish person who’s growing up in
today’s world and asking himself why they didn’t resist, why they helped
the Nazis, why they were living like this.”Nelson’s quest for authenticity took The Grey Zone further than any other film in terms of its evocation of the mechanics of the Holocaust. Undeterred by Shoah-director
Claude Lanzmann’s belief that the Holocaust is beyond the grasp of
narrative film, or even filmic representation — “There is a certain
degree of horror that cannot be transmitted. To claim it is possible to
do so is to be guilty of the most serious transgression,” Lanzmann has
said — Nelson recreated Auschwitz’s crematoria in Bulgaria, taking the
viewer through the entire process of reducing humans from flesh-and-bone
to ash. “If what you want to do, as an artist, is to illuminate the
human condition in any small way, then it seems to me that tragic
historical events like the Holocaust are exactly what should be dealt
with in artistic media such as film,” argues Nelson. However, he would
not have made a film set during the Holocaust at all if he felt it had
nothing to say about our lives now.

Indeed, before writing his play of The Grey Zone, he had
worked for over 18 months researching and writing a play about his
grandparents’ (his grandfather was a lawyer disbarred by the Nuremberg
Laws) and mother’s experience in Weimar Germany and during the rise of
National Socialism, and finally their escape on the eve of
Kristallnacht. But “because it felt so familiar, I cast it aside”, he
says. “I don’t think people have the time, interest or energy to
experience Holocaust stories that are redundant at this time.”The Sonderkommando’s story seemed relevant to him because of how
chillingly desensitised the men became: “How workaday, even for the
Jews, the violence was. What they learnt was to ignore,” says Nelson.After the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004, and other recent atrocities, The Grey Zone seems more relevant than ever. “I believe, in the hope of not permitting this to ever happen again,
that it is best to look at the slaughter of the millions of Jews and
gypsies in the concentration camps, and take a close look at the Jewish
people who were there,” says Keitel. “It seems to me we must come to
terms with the ability of humankind to slaughter children, to slaughter
women, to slaughter helpless people. We have the capacity to do that.
But we also have the capacity to pick up a gun and kill back to stop the
slaughter.”

"Your piece is one of the most comprehensive, eloquent, and powerful discussions of the film I have read." Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing

"Stephen, this is a fabulous piece; you did a superlative job in communicating the film and its essence." Erik Greenberg Anjou, director of Deli Man

"I have to thank you. It's a very good [Mein Kampf] article, which you have written; it reflects very sharply and especially fairly the various positions." Dr. Christian Hartmann, Institute of Contemporary History Munich